Direct Mail vs. Email for Industrial Marketers. What Works Best?

I have often wondered if there were quantitative differences between direct mail ROI (return on investment) and email ROI?

I recently found a study done this past January (2013) from Harvard Business Review. It is very instructive and appears to answer some pretty basic questions and dilemmas we all face while marketing to your industrial customers.

As you can see this is from HubSpot, one of the real content kings on the web. Clearly content such as this is designed to sell HubSpot services…in this case the e-mail capabilities of HubSpot’s integrated marketing software.

True to the HubSpot mantra, “Always provide an offer and a call-to-action (CTA)” there is an offer at the bottom of this blog post. Providing great content with offers and calls-to-action is why they are the market leader in integrated marketing software…and their software is terrific and produces measurable ROIs.

I have used massive amounts of paper printing out HubSpot’s white papers (sorry tree huggers!) such as the one featured in this blog post. I have always found HubSpot’s content to be top quality. I believe HubSpot’s endorsement provides creditability to this study…not to mention the data originated from Harvard Business Review.